Score one for me, I promised this column in my list of New Year’s Resolutions a couple of weeks ago. The one about Uwe Boll’s new movie, In the Name of the King, A Dungeon Siege Tale, and I’m here to deliver. But come on, how many times in a writing career can one go to the Boll well? I’m looking at the list of notes I took during the movie, my metaphorical bucketful of water, and I find it less then potable.

The credits for this movie, which I sat through on the suspicion that there’d be a scene afterward (there wasn’t) and during which re-wrote my notes that were barely legible once bathed in light, ran for more than five minutes. Hundreds of people worked on this movie, and even thought it was filmed using non-union locals, I’m sure that they were paid. Sure Uwe is making a fortune off of some loophole in German tax law that I don’t understand (or even tried real hard to learn about), but what about the costumer? The Key Grip? The on set-medic? They were there making a living. And who can blame them for that?

Afterward I discussed the film briefly with an internet film critic who was catching the same showing, bringing the ratio of media critics to actual moviegoers in this particular theater to 2:5, the both of us with our downward managed expectations left the theater feeling nothing. It was a bad movie, we expected that, but it wasn’t terrible enough to renew our derision, or even better than we expected to leave us the least bit surprised. It was the cinematic equivalent of multiplying by zero.

Standing outside in the light snow, I looked up at the sky and shook my fist, bellowing like Daffy Duck after being tormented by an unseen hand, “Who’s responsible?!?” Where do those who should truly draw my ire dwell? I dug around in my pocket and came up with my ticket stub. Torn in half it read, “Dungeon Siege.” The game this movie was supposedly ‘based on.’ It was more nonsense, what does “Dungeon Siege” even mean? Strictly defined, other then the one on the Bastille, which only lasted a few hours before it was raided, dungeons aren’t even ‘sieged.’ Semantics aside, “Dungeon Siege” is just an attempt to provide its attached game with a name descriptive enough to explain the premise to perspective buyers. This is probably why the “In the Name of the King” part was added to the title of the movie, since it does not prominently feature a dungeon, let alone any scene involving a siege.

So what’s the big deal? This movie opened in 14th place (the only time I’ll ever check the top weekend movie listings, for a reason that’s not germane to even the purpose of Back Of The Bus), everyone got paid, and no one who didn’t see it missed anything. But the problem remains: a bad movie stink that spreads all over the gaming world, and I know whose fault it is. It’s not Uwe, it’s the publisher that sells the game’s rights to ‘filmmakers’ like Uwe. The quick buck they can get now masks the future damage that’s done to their intellectual property by a poor licensing effort. Rights holders need to think about what they do with the responsibility that comes with controlling the end result of thousands of man-hours of creative effort on the parts of the developers. If the right holders can finally restrain themselves and think about the long-term value of their properties, people like Dr. Boll could go strip-mine another form of media for his films…like Hummel figurines.

Oh, one last thing about the movie: if you actually hit something with a thrown boomerang, first of all congratulations, but really, it’s not going to come back again after it hits anything. This movie got the closest to having the most realistic (yet still very incorrect) use of one in cinema, gaming, television, heck all of media history, having it come back to the thrower’s hand only once after somehow not transferring all of it’s momentum into it’s target. So there you go, Best Performance by a Boomerang in a Motion Picture. Cue the Orchestra

ARCHIVE
Comments? Questions? E-mail me at seth410@gamertransit.com. Complaints? What do you have to complain about? I had to pay to see this movie!
Back of the Bus is © 2008 by Seth “4:10” Robison, used with exclusive permission by gamertransit.com. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.